After the success of Richard III, Amadeus and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Gloucester Productions continues to present intriguing, challenging and entertaining classics to Cape Town audiences. To start 2026, Gloucester Productions presents AN ILIAD - A visceral retelling of Homer’s epic for our time

Multi-award wining actor, Alan Committie, returns to the Baxter theatre to play “Poet” in Lisa Peterson’s AN ILIAD.

War has never been ancient history. AN ILIAD brings Homer’s legendary tale crashing into the present — not as a museum piece, but as a living, urgent act of storytelling. In this stripped-back, electrifying stage work, a single Poet and a live musician (the Muse) summon the Trojan War in real time, asking a simple, unsettling question: why do we keep telling this story — and why do we keep living it?

This is not a polite, distant epic.
It is immediate. Human. Darkly funny. Brutal. Tender.

You don’t need to know Homer.
You don’t need to love epics.
You only need to be human.

AN ILIAD is directed by acclaimed director Geoffrey Hyland and the newly created soundscape by the multi-award winning Charl- Johan Lingenfelder.

“AN ILIAD is pure theater: shocking, glorious, primal and deeply satisfying.” —Time
“Spellbinding … Smartly conceived and impressively executed” – New York Times

A reminder that the oldest stories still know us better than we think.